Welcome to the Plane Ride From Hell, coming more often to an airline near you thanks to — you guessed it — climate change. While this imagined scenario might be an ever-so-slight exaggeration, new research published today in Nature Climate Change points to increased turbulence frequency and strength due to our ongoing greenhouse gas bonanza.

According to the paper, clear-air turbulence — that is, the kind that satellites and on-board radar don’t pick up — will likely double by the mid-2050s. The average strength of turbulence will also increase by about 10 to 40 percent. “Flights will be less comfortable and there will be more drinks spilled,” says Paul Williams, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Reading and lead author of the paper.

Atmospheric turbulence causes most weather-related aircraft incidents, yet before now no one thought to look at how it might change as climactic processes become more erratic. “When I looked through the literature, I was astonished to find that no one had done it before,” Williams said.

Williams and co-author Manoj Joshi decided to investigate this question for themselves. The researchers homed in on clear-air turbulence, or patches of vertical airflow linked to the atmospheric jet stream, in the busy transatlantic flight corridor, where around 600 flights criss-cross between Europe and North America daily. They used climate models to simulate how the jet stream will change when carbon dioxide levels double, and how that, in turn, will translate into turbulence. (When, exactly, that doubling will occur depends upon the levels of greenhouse gas emissions we continue to pump into the atmosphere, but the authors went with the middle-ground projection, falling somewhere in the 2050s.)

The jet stream makes its way around the entire northern hemisphere, by the way, not just between Europe and North America. The authors expect the same increase in turbulence to apply to pretty much all airline routes that come into contact with the jet stream wherever this natural phenomenon speeds up.

Flights currently encounter clear-air turbulence about 1 percent of the time. Besides causing butterflies in the stomach and morbid thoughts of a watery death in the Atlantic, turbulence injures hundreds of passengers per year, occasionally leading to fatalities, and costs the airlines around $150 million annually in delays and damages. How those misfortunes will fluctuate isn’t certain, but more patches of unsteady air probably means more time spent either bumping through or else navigating around those trouble spots. “This is where we get onto more speculations and plausible possibilities rather than things demonstrated by hard science,” Williams points out.

Either way, we’re getting what we paid for. The airline industry accounts for around 2 to 3 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, but because those emissions are pumped into the upper atmosphere, they have an outsized impact on the climate. And flight numbers are only set to grow in the future with increasing populations, personal affluence, and globalization.

“You could see it as the atmosphere getting its own back by taking revenge on planes and causing more trouble,” Williams says. “It’s absolutely poetic justice.”

In an increasingly disaster-prone world, where terms like “climate refugee” and “environmental evacuee” are becoming commonplace, figuring out how, when, and why people respond to extreme weather is essential for preparing for the next calamity.

Luckily, researchers are on it. They’re designing ways to mine emails, cell signals, check-ins, and tweets for insights into how people will react to the next hurricane, heat wave, or city-swallowing derecho.

When a city is destroyed, keeping up with its fleeing residents is no small task, says Linus Bengtsson, a medical doctor at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Some go to refugee camps, he says, but others hunker down in the ruins while many scatter to the four winds. Those not in the camps “are not really visible,” Bengtsson says. As a result, they miss out on medical aid, food, and supplies provided by rescue crews.

Following the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Bengtsson and his colleagues pioneered a new method of tracking refugees using cell phone data from 1.9 million anonymous cell users. During the immediate aftermath and for the next year, they distributed reports to relief agencies to help them hone their efforts at delivering supplies and medical care.

When cholera struck in October, within 12 hours of receiving data, their system began providing an analysis of how people responded to the disease. Travelers fleeing the infected areas could bring cholera with them, for example, so their report alerted aid agencies where to be on the lookout for new outbreaks.

Among their more surprising findings was that within weeks of the earthquake, people’s trajectories quickly normalized. Many residents left Port-au-Prince about three weeks after the catastrophe and headed straight for friends’ or families’ homes. After leaving the capital, people quickly adopted regular movement patterns — from work, to the store, and home, for example.

The results suggest that, even in a chaotic situation, people’s movements are strongly influenced by their social bonds and historic behavior. In other words, their actions are predictable.

Encouraged by their experiences, Bengtsson and his colleagues are founding Flowminder.org, a nonprofit dedicated to aggregating, analyzing, and disseminating real-time anonymous displacement data following natural disasters in developing countries. The service will be provided free of charge, in the hopes of helping relief agencies deliver the right supplies to the right place at the right time.

Other researchers are also seizing upon the power of communication technologies. Emilio Zagheni, a demographer at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, got ahold of messages sent by 43 million anonymous Yahoo! users from 2009 to 2011 to see how global populations shifted in almost every country in the world. He revealed a few new trends. Women are increasingly on the move compared to men, for example, and Mexican immigrants to the U.S. make frequent trips back home. Besides teasing out immigration and emigration patterns, he says, the method could reveal if people respond to long-term climate change in the coming years by permanently relocating.

This type of research doesn’t just focus on doom and gloom. Anastasios Noulas, a doctoral candidate in computer science at the University of Cambridge, uses Foursquare to find patterns in people’s movements [PDF] in urban centers around the world. He’s found that the principle factor driving mobility patterns is a city’s density. In New York, for example, the bodega or bar is a short walk away, whereas San Antonio might require taking the car to reach the nearest convenience store or watering hole. The denser the city, the shorter the movements, which in turn influences a city’s underlying culture. “It’s all about understanding ourselves,” Noulas says of his data.

Similarly, Laura Ferrari, a doctoral student in information and communication technology at the University of Modena and Reggio Emila in Italy, uses Twitter to tease out urban mobility patterns. Her work helps predict crowd behavior after a soccer match, for example, or identifies emerging nightlife hotspots. She imagines a future in which data from different technologies are combined to illuminate a single problem. “One social network is not better than the other,” she says. “They all have different scopes so you can use them to understand different things.”

I spent a pleasant week stranded on the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina roared through my hometown in 2005. In the storm’s wake, confusion reined supreme. Rumors flew about where aid workers would next be tossing out water bottles like so many Mardi Gras beads, or where gas could be procured with only a nine-hour overnight wait.

I try to imagine how different that experience could have been had FEMA been able to pinpoint where everyone was holed up and where we would eventually go. In the rosy, data-filled future, my storm grievances are replaced with smiling aid workers showing up with juice to fuel the sputtering generator, a fresh change of clothes, and a hug.

And when I finally depart the washed-out coast and head north with a trunk full of soggy belongings, my first FEMA check is already waiting in the mailbox at my new home-away-from-home. A list is beamed directly into my cellphone detailing where to meet other survivors for a much-needed drink, and of course Foursquare is hosting a 2-for-1 check-in special for us evacuees.

Plucking seemingly random weeds out of the dirt and sticking them in your mouth may be disconcerting to most city dwellers, but that’s exactly what a group of New Yorkers traveled to New Jersey to do recently.

Squinting in the sun on a patch of meadow, we watched as our fearless guide, Tama Matsuoka Wong, author of the new cookbook and guide Foraged Flavor, expertly scavenged delectable weed after delectable weed. From dainty yellow wood sorrel to aromatic garlic mustard, we smelled the newly picked shoots, and then gingerly took a nibble. Our taste buds were rewarded by flavors that were bright, fresh, and alive. And by the time we’d made our way past the meadow and into the forest, we were like a pack of hungry rabbits, chewing away at whatever tasty morsel Wong handed us.

A professional forager, Wong co-authored Foraged Flavor with Eddy Leroux, chef at the New York restaurant Daniel. The book offers up detailed instructions on the when, where, and how of foraging and presents dishes centered around 72 of Wong and Leroux’s favorite wild plants. Their resulting recipes are easy yet unique, and include dishes like dandelion flower tempura and grilled daylily shoots.

Of the approximately 300,000 wild plants in the world, experts say that between 4,000 and 7,000 are known to be edible. Compare that with the measly produce selection in your local grocery store (where it’s rare to see more than 60 types of fruits and veggies) and it’s clear your taste buds are missing many an opportunity.

“The way we farm has become so industrial and seems to focus less on the flavor and variety of food,” Wong says. It’s only in the last century that small, local subsistence agriculture has given way to large-scale commercial food production. Along with this shift, most traditional foraging knowledge has disappeared. The result is a loss of variety, but also of biodiversity — a crucial element of food security.

While Wong’s not suggesting we raze the big farms and return to the caves, she does encourage readers to open their eyes to the medley of dinnertime opportunities that may be growing smack in their own backyards. (As many as 20 different plant species can be found in one nine-inch square patch of meadow, she says.)

Wong wants to introduce the crazy and unique to the dinner table, but she also points out that many wild plants are highly nutritious. For example, purslane, a Persian herb that appears in the book’s eggplant caponata recipe, is a little known source of omega-3, while sumac, a bright red berry that makes for a mean jelly or tart, comes locked and loaded with vitamin C.

In addition to all of these priceless benefits, foraged foods are, well, priceless. Nutritious, yummy, and free — what more could an adventurous diner want? Spring and early summer are some of the best times to hunt for your favorite wild foods (it’s pineapple weed, lamb’s quarters, and wild garlic season in New York), so get ye to a meadow or vacant lot for some quality foraging.

Filed under: Article, Food]]>http://grist.org/food/wild-plants-the-best-ingredients-you-didnt-know-you-had/feed/0foraging-500foraging-500A professional forager shares her secrets [SLIDESHOW]http://grist.org/slideshow/a-professional-forager-shares-her-secrets-slideshow/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_rachelnuwer
http://grist.org/slideshow/a-professional-forager-shares-her-secrets-slideshow/#commentsTue, 19 Jun 2012 11:26:34 +0000http://grist.org/?p=112619]]>Tama Matsuoka Wong doesn’t just frolic in her New Jersey forest, she eats it. A group of New Yorkers recently visited this delicious patch of land to learn about how a weed becomes a delicacy and to celebrate Wong’s new book Foraged Flavor. Read the whole story here.Filed under: Article, Food]]>http://grist.org/slideshow/a-professional-forager-shares-her-secrets-slideshow/feed/0A foraging adventureIn Baltimore, the gods will not save you — but the trees willhttp://grist.org/cities/in-baltimore-the-gods-will-not-save-you-but-the-trees-will/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_rachelnuwer
http://grist.org/cities/in-baltimore-the-gods-will-not-save-you-but-the-trees-will/#commentsTue, 29 May 2012 11:29:30 +0000http://grist.org/?p=108521]]>Thanks to The Wire, who can resist conjuring images of ghetto projects and rampant crime when thinking of the fine city of Baltimore? Indeed, Baltimore’s crime à la HBO is out of control. Someone should have told Detective McNulty he could have skipped five seasons’ worth of pager taps, drug raids, and binge drinking if he had only been armed with a real crime-stopping weapon: trees.

That’s right, trees. Like the big, green, CO2-sucking kind. It turns out that in addition to housing squirrels, they also reduce lawless activity. This is the conclusion drawn by a team of researchers who teased apart the relationship between tree canopy and crime in and around Baltimore. They used aggregated crime data from Spotcrime and overlaid it with high-res satellite imagery to conduct probably the largest analysis of its kind to date.

According to the study, a 10 percent increase in trees roughly equaled a 12 percent decrease in crime. “It’s really pretty striking how strong this relationship is,” says Austin Troy, director of the University of Vermont’s Transportation Research Center and lead author of the study, published in the June issue of the journal Landscape and Urban Planning.

The question of whether trees repel or attract crime has fueled two decades’ worth of arguments between cops and crime analysts. It all started back in 1992, when a couple of researchers postulated that shrubby, dense vegetation — think briar patch surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle — encouraged lawlessness. Bad guys like to hide out in the bushes, right?

Not so fast, said another camp. These tree huggers pointed out that people enjoy spending time in pleasant outdoor spaces, which creates more “eyes on the streets” to deter criminals from doing bad things. By this way of thinking — which is similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s favorite school of criminology, “the broken window theory” — a well-tended bunch of trees sends a warning to would-be robbers that stoop-sitters and dog-walkers are watching. “If I was a criminal, that’s probably not where I’d want to be,” Troy says.

Lest you think that the connection between trees and crime-free zones is a simple result of the fact that trees are an indicator of wealthier parts of town, the researchers were all over this one. In their models, they controlled for all kinds of socioeconomic factors, including income, housing age, and owner race, plus adjusted for other variables associated with tree cover, like ruralness and population density. After holding all of these points steady, trees still wound up on top.

There were a few exceptions to the rule, however. A few pesky Baltimore locales actually showed the opposite effect — that trees increased crime. These haunts were a sort of no-man’s land of vacant expanses nestled between industrial and residential areas. Troy suspects that the type of vegetation growing there is of the shrubby, weedy variety rather than the majestic, treeish kind, though a formal study would have to prove this. If he’s right, the two arguments — that criminals like to hide out in the bushes, and that criminals don’t like pretty trees — may not be so incompatible after all.

Troy and his colleagues plan to filter out the effects of different vegetation types in future studies, but for now they suggest the police become a bit more hands-on in urban landscape planning and green thumbing. “This is an element of crime fighting,” he says, adding that it’s “a major addition to the burgeoning list of the many benefits of urban trees.”